May 2008

God for Weasels

One of the great things about being ignorant is that I often think my ideas are original. It’s a wonderful feeling. That’s why I try to avoid any knowledge that would spoil the sensation. Sometimes it isn’t easy. People keep hurling knowledge at me, and I can’t always duck.

For example, people often accuse me of ripping off the great philosopher Spinoza when I write about the universe being God, or when I say people obviously have no free will. I act like I know what they are talking about and quickly change the subject. In reality, I didn’t know Spinoza from Shinola.

Einstein has famously said he believes in Spinoza’s version of God. I always wondered why he invoked Spinoza. It was time to find out about this Spinoza dude. I’m far too lazy to read an entire book, so I went to Wikipedia and read what strangers with no credibility had to say about him.

Holy cow! My opinions match Spinoza’s perfectly. It turns out that being ignorant is almost exactly like being a well-read student of philosophy who can quote from the work of the masters. How lucky is that?

Now I know why Einstein invoked Spinoza when talking about his beliefs. Einstein discovered more than the theory of relativity. He also found a way to act like he believed in God, so all the God-lovers would accept him as their own, while simultaneously saying God is nothing more than semantics, so atheists would embrace him too. And he blamed it all on a dead guy, Spinoza. How many ways does Einstein need to keep proving he’s a genius? I mean seriously, this is just showing off.

I have decided to adopt Einstein’s weasel-genius view of God so everyone thinks I’m on their side. That could come in handy when I run for President. For the record, I believe in Spinoza’s God. Less than one percent of Americans will know what that means. The other 99% will think I believe God is a bearded guy who hands out harps in the afterlife. They will love me for being on their side.

I think Spinoza would be proud to know that his life’s work boiled down to creating a God for weasels.

Could someone illuminate me as to the difference between random and free? If you think about the cconcept of free wil it necessarily involves a contradiction... unless the freedom of will is the product of randomness. As far as i am concerned the 'will' that is free is a product of interactions between chaotic and indeterminate particles. This is Free Will.

i live about 800m from a house where Spinoza lived for a few years. apparently he was really small because the doorways are approx. 2/3rd the height of normal, modern doorways. short people got no reason to live. so there.

String theory??? It should have been called String shot-in-the-dark-from-mathematical-left-field. I'd say it sounds like this blessed de Spinoza guy invalidates string theory, not the other way around. Way to burst my bubble-universe. Wait, wait...maybe the little spaghetti-strings were the god/infinite substance that Einstein was talking about. Someone update Einstein on wikuhpedia...clearly he discovered strings as well as gravity waves and special relativity.

By the way, I am really disappointed in this post. When I went to click on the link, I thought for sure that it would be about Dogbert-worshipping Mustelidae.

This belief, I believe, makes you a Deist. Basically, the idea is that whatever it is that set the universe in motion -- that is God. And if you feel the desire to know God and appreciate it, the only way we have to do so is by studying and appreciating its creations -- the world and its inhabitants.

A similar world view -- if you simly ignore the questions of "Who is God?" and, "What is God?", is Humanism.

Those questions, of course, are immaterial to the Deist or the Humanist, in that they are irrelevant to the questions of how one should live one's life.

Have you read this book from Richard Dawkins called "God Delusion"?
In the book Prof. Dawkins brings out:
But Einstein also said, "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it
is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
[Source: Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion]

Further:
Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.' [I guess a Twist to the word God-fearing!]

I.e. knew the mass and velocity and the forces acting on every particle in the universe could you predict the future? And lets say you built a machine that took this information and could tell you, at the press of a button, an event that will take place at some time in the future,

I believe such a machine cannot exist. My theory is that the universe itself is the most efficient encoding of all the information in the universe, therefore any machine that encoded all this information would have to be bigger than, and separate from, the universe. Which is impossible. It is impossible to know all the information, so it is impossible to predict the future with perfect accuracy, even if the future is predetermined.

And that doesn't even invoke the uncertainty principle, which implies that it is impossible to know the future of even a single electron, let alone the whole universe...

What are those self portraits these last couple of days telling us about your self image?
-The big head,
-Very tidy outfit,
-painstakingly drawn hair,
-good posture,
-tiny mouth when not speaking but perfect circle and big when talking,
-bigger asymmetric ears when being spoken to by someone not he PHB,
-little arm clench at the punch line.

Now, I’m not qualified to comment on such things so my opinion counts more than the next man’s, and I say this; you have a big head, funny ears, elastic features and you spend too much time whipping the person who does your ironing. Go on, deny it!